Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 31

"What have we here?" Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt's shop, which had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against the wall, clearing a large open s.p.a.ce that was lined with long trestle tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage video-game s.h.i.+rts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.

He was roundly ignored -- and before he could speak again, one of the PCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music that made him think of Elvis ca.s.settes that had been submerged in salt water. Half of the a.s.sembled ma.s.s started bobbing their heads and singing along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.

Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning down the volume a little. "Howdy!" he said, spreading his arms and taking in the whole of his dominion.

"Howdy yourself," Alan said. "What do we have here?"

"We have a glut of volunteers," Kurt said, watching as an old rummy carefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus its housing. "I can't figure out if those laptop screens are worth anything," he said, c.o.c.king his head. "But they've been taking up s.p.a.ce for far too long. Time we moved them."

Alan looked around and realized that the workers he'd taken to be at work building access points were, in the main, shooting digital pictures of junk from Kurt's diving runs and researching them for eBay listings. It made him feel good -- great, even. It was like watching an Inventory being a.s.sembled from out of chaos.

"Where'd they all come from?"

Kurt shrugged. "I dunno. I guess we hit critical ma.s.s. You recruit a few people, they recruit a few people. It's a good way to make a couple bucks, you get to play with boss c.r.a.p, you get paid in cash, and you have colorful co-workers." He shrugged again. "I guess they came from wherever the trash came from. The city provides."

The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. "If either of you says something like, *Ah, these people were discarded by society, but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen the worth of these poor folks and rescued them from the sc.r.a.pheap of society,* I'm gonna puke."

"The thought never crossed my mind," Alan said solemnly.

"Keep it up, Wes," Kurt said, patting the man on the shoulder. "See you at the Greek's tonight?"

"Every night, so long as he keeps selling the cheapest beer in the Market," Wes said, winking at Alan.

"It's cash in the door," Kurt said. "Buying components is a lot more efficient than trying to find just the right parts." He gave Alan a mildly reproachful look. Ever since they'd gone to strictly controlled designs, Kurt had been heartbroken by the amount of really nice c.r.a.p that never made its way into an access point.

"This is pretty amazing," Alan said. "You're splitting the money with them?"

"The profit -- anything leftover after buying packaging and paying postage." He walked down the line, greeting people by name, shaking hands, marveling at the gewgaws and gimcracks that he, after all, had found in some nighttime dumpster and brought back to be recycled. "G.o.d, I love this. It's like Napster for dumpsters."

"How's that?" Alan asked, pouring himself a coffee and adding some UHT cream from a giant, slightly dented box of little creamers.

"Most of the music ever recorded isn't for sale at any price. Like 80 percent of it. And the labels, they've made copyright so strong, no one can figure out who all that music belongs to -- not even them! Costs a fortune to clear a song. Pal of mine once did a CD of Christmas music remixes, and he tried to figure out who owned the rights to all the songs he wanted to use. He just gave up after a year -- and he had only cleared one song!

"So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting all that music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of people an incentive to rip their old CDs -- h.e.l.l, their old vinyl and tapes, too! -- and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that, but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: a library raising!"

Alan nodded. "So what's your point -- that companies' dumpsters are being napstered by people like you?" A napsterized Inventory. Alan felt the *rightness* of it.

Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it on the side of the table. "Exactly!" he said. "This is garbage -- it's like the deleted music that you can't buy today, except at the bottom of bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has acc.u.mulated in landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into digital files and upload it to the net -- but if you give people an incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work to help you..." He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and popped its latches and swung it open.

"Look at that -- I didn't get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money that I exchanged for parts that someone else found in *her* dumpster --"

"Her?"

"Trying not to be s.e.xist," Kurt said.

"Are there female dumpster divers?"

"Got me," Kurt said. "In ten years of this, I've only run into other divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where it needs to be. So it's not cost effective for some big corporation to figure out how to use or sell these -- so what? It's not cost-effective for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of my favorite bands in print, either. We'll figure it out. We're spookily good at it."

"Spookily?"

"Trying to be more poetic." He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. "Got a new girlfriend, she says there's not enough poetry in my views on garbage."

They found one of Davey's old nests in March, on a day when you could almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in the Market's second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in Alan's attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he'd found in Bell Canada's Willowdale switching station dumpster.

Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the antenna mounting atop the synagogue's roof. It had taken three meetings with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple's youth caucus and getting *them* to explain it to the old cleric. The synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.

They'd worried about the fight they'd have over drilling through the roof to punch down a wire, but they needn't have: The wood up there was soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loct.i.te over the nuts and washers and slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.

Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt's heart was aburst with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he caught sight of Kurt's face, ashen, wide-eyed.

"I saw something," he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His hands were shaking.

"What?"

"Footprints," he said. "There's a lot of leaves that have rotted down to mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the mud. Like a toddler's footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs -- so dried up that I couldn't figure out what they were at first.

"But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints behind like unbent paperclips."

Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.

"Be careful, it's all rotten up there," Kurt called. Alan nodded.

"Sure, thank you," he said, hearing himself say it as though from very far away.

The rooftop was littered with broken gla.s.s and sc.u.mmy puddles of melt.w.a.ter and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth marks on the birds. They hadn't been eaten, they'd been torn apart, like a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured Davey sitting here on the synagogue's roof, listening to the evening prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand, writhing.

He wondered if he was catching Bradley's precognition, and if that meant that Bradley was dead now.

Bradley was born with the future in his eyes. He emerged from the belly of their mother with bright brown eyes that did not roll aimlessly in the manner of babies, but rather sought out the corners of the cave where interesting things were happening, where movement was about to occur, where life was being lived. Before he developed the muscle strength and coordination necessary to crawl, he mimed crawling, seeing how it was that he would someday move.

He was the easiest of all the babies to care for, easier even than Carlo, who had no needs other than water and soil and cooing rea.s.surance. Toilet training: As soon as he understood what was expected of him -- they used the downstream-most bend of one of the underground rivers -- Benny could be relied upon to begin tottering toward the spot in sufficient time to drop trou and do his business in just the right spot.

(Alan learned to pay attention when Bruce was reluctant to leave home for a walk during those days -- the same premonition that made him perfectly toilet-trained at home would have him in fretting sweats at the foreknowledge that he has destined to soil himself during the recreation.)

His nightmares ran twice: once just before bed, in clairvoyant preview, and again in the depths of REM sleep. Alan learned to talk him down from these crises, to soothe the worry, and in the end it worked to everyone's advantage, defusing the nightmares themselves when they came.

He never forgot anything -- never forgot to have Alan forge a signature on a permission form, never forgot to bring in the fossil he'd found for show-and-tell, never forgot his mittens in the cloakroom and came home with red, chapped hands. Once he started school, he started seeing to it that Alan never forgot anything, either.

He did very well on quizzes and tests, and he never let the pitcher fake him out when he was at bat.

After four years alone with the golems, Alan couldn't have been more glad to have a brother to keep him company.